I really like Faith Shearin’s works and I want to point them out as a retort to those who believe that modern poetry is not longer poetry because it lacks metre and rhyme. What this poem manages to do is tell a story that sweeps up the reader into knowing much more about the mother than a more general remembrance would give us.

Shearin is specific and sincere. I think I like that about some contemporary poets: they paint a very specific picture and invite us to relate to it. Without the self-conscious nodding and winking irony (that’s you, Billy Collins) or the sometimes very amorphous nature-worship (I look at your, Mary Oliver) we have a mother who has gone through various musical phases as she has grown older.

The segue between Evita and Italian opera and the music of the protesting car jolts us with the knowledge (which we already have) that this is the way the world ends for this mother.

The poem invites me to reflect upon the soundtrack of my mother’s life: Frank Sinatra to Broadway musicals to blaring out Carmen to Beethoven to raptures over Franz Schubert and finally to deeply cherishing Vaughan-Williams, Faure, and Delius. She went off to do a “Delius and Thomas Hardy” tour of England–old, widowed, but my God—she was really so young!

And for her 70th birthday celebration she wanted nothing more than to have her five remaining children sitting on a sofa watching her “conduct” the Ring Cycle. That did not last long as you might imagine. She beamed with pride and pleasure as she conducted the very slow, gradual start of Das Rheingold. If her children would not pay attention to her very much, she could use her birthday to express herself without the dangerous medium of words.

And finally the final soundtrack—the beeps and blips of a hospital room, the urgent calls over the loudspeaker for Code Blue Stat and the general cacophony which is the music that accompanies most of our deaths.

Faith Shearin makes me partake most lovingly in memory. Her poems invite us to share her point of view and her vision about many things. They wander in the vast fields of “memory and desire” where I spend much of my life today.

4 thoughts on “Faith Shearin: “Music at My Mother’s Funeral””

This poem – and your commentary and response – are beautiful. And all equally engaging; I immediately want to pause and reflect on the soundtrack to my own life and noted with shock and sadness that I wouldn’t know where to start in creating something similar for my mother. This will linger in the back of my mind …

A lovely poem. And thanks for sharing your own story along with it. Part of my mom’s soundtrack will include Johnny Cash. she had a tape when I was a kid that she listened too so often that she wore it out and the day it broke was one of tragic mourning. 🙂

Thank you so much for your comment, Stefanie. I can well understand that a broken tape or LP or CD would be cause for deep mourning. It’s a way of keeping our parents alive, in some way, when we remember what they loved and what they listened too. I hope your mother has found new ways to play Johnny Cash.

Shh... don't tell anyone I'm poor. They all think I'm living frugal and green just like everyone these days. This is a blog about a senior citizen living a frugal life, on a fixed income, in a low income food desert, and passing along knowledge from lessons learned. Some she learned from her Grandma Mama many years ago and some learned only a few days ago.

Shh... don't tell anyone I'm poor. They all think I'm living frugal and green just like everyone these days. This is a blog about a senior citizen living a frugal life, on a fixed income, in a low income food desert, and passing along knowledge from lessons learned. Some she learned from her Grandma Mama many years ago and some learned only a few days ago.